


The Stone Inside You Still Hasn't Hit Bottom

by thought



Series: War Stories and Other Fairy Tales [2]
Category: Red vs. Blue
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-20
Updated: 2014-09-20
Packaged: 2018-02-18 02:01:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,255
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2331104
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thought/pseuds/thought
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There's a bicycle and two people and one body in the apartment. Begin at the beginning.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Stone Inside You Still Hasn't Hit Bottom

There's a bicycle leaned up in the corner of the one room apartment, handlebars wedged deliberately under the door handle so that no one can open it from the outside. There are herb boxes filling the narrow strip of ornamental balcony, tomato plants draping themselves over the railing and a compost bin tucked in the far back. Everything smells like coffee-- fresh beans from the local roaster waiting to be ground, stale dregs left too long in the bottoms of forgotten mugs.

There are two people living here, for now. Begin at the beginning. There is only one body, but they know how to share. There are plenty of nightmares to go around, plenty of philosophical musings on the nature of the universe, plenty of opinions on the best way to brew coffee and bake apples and reduce red wine for a marinade. Between one organic brain and one glossy computer chip they have learned how to make room.

The name on the lease is a false one. The name that gets called across the coffee shop at seven-thirty each Friday morning is a false one, too, but it fits him better than any real name ever did. There is a convention waiting to be shattered. York is the truest name he's ever had but it is not his real name and everyone knows that real names are the secrets you keep locked away if you want to stay safe. Names have power. This is not a new idea. The convention teeters. The act of naming can be just as powerful. York works at the library. He is painfully cognizant of the story he is acting out.

On Saturdays they ride their bicycle to the market. On Sundays they volunteer at the food bank, and on Mondays at the veterans' society along with the tiny old woman who lives across the hall and the awkward, earnest teenager whose foster family just moved in down the street. Tuesdays there are free lectures open to the public at the university, and they spend an hour and a half on the bus each way to sit in an uncomfortable plastic chair while a sleep-deprived professor throws ideas out into a sea of anonymous faces with the desperation that something might stick—after all, these faces have chosen to be here. Thursdays are board games at the community centre and beers afterward at whichever tiny cafe or brewery is struggling to make rent this week. They drink until they can actually fall asleep, then stagger through the pre-dawn damp silent streets for Friday morning breakfast at the diner beside the coffee shop, squashed into a booth meant for five with eight other people and drinking the coffee fast so the burned dishwater taste can't linger on their tongue. The routine is important. Their minds are dangerous woods, mysterious and labyrinthine with monsters in the treetops, easy to get lost in.

Autumn arrives three days before Carolina does. It's Saturday afternoon and the apartment smells like smoke. They're sitting on the bed under a hand-knitted blanket, Delta typing up an article for the local newspaper even as their fingers get numb from the chill in the air through the open windows. Carolina knocks at the door like an adventurer seeking passage to another realm. Her hair is the same colour as the dying leaves. York's coffee gets cold as they stand in the doorway, staring at each other.

"I heard rumours," she says, and York is certain, as he is certain of few things, that he is dreaming. She steps forward, and he doesn't move back quickly enough and all of a sudden they're holding on to each other like magnets, uncoordinated and frantic and it is delta who brings their arms up, who needs the assurance of reality that the physicality brings.

Carolina does not leave. There is a new way of being for all of them, the slow process of learning that is wanting each other, that is examining the equation and finding "need" has made itself absent when they weren't looking. Carolina tucks herself away from the world for the first time, wraps herself in blankets and smoke and coffee and closes the curtains to create a world that she can cross in twelve steps. It's a world that York and Delta cannot inhabit for fear of the places in their minds. Carolina is making peace with her monsters. Carolina knows what it is to have screaming in your head and this place with the soft sweaters and the ripe tomato vines is not it. There is a value to the quiet.

Carolina buys a bike from somebody's uncle, and she and York race to the market every Saturday morning. She always wins. Carolina gets her hair cut in the basement of the run-down building with the creaky wooden stairs that York recommends. The woman with the scissors brushes a hand across the scars at the bottom of her neck and asks "How many of you are in here?"

"Just me, now," Carolina says, instead of pulling a gun. She doesn't think she's lying.

Carolina grows tomatoes inside over the long, brutally cold winter, and in the spring she holds workshops on Saturday afternoons in the library to teach people how to grow the best tomatoes. During the winter she stays up late talking with delta and wakes up with the watery late morning sun, long after York has left. It's a strange way to live, and there's guilt that gnaws at the corners of her thoughts even as she drinks the coffee that York has left on the counter and reads the note that Delta has tucked beneath it, outlining exactly where they've gone and when they'll be back. She shovels the old ice rink in the park behind the abandoned school. She teaches herself to skate, and then she teaches the kids from the community centre how to skate. It is her first snowy winter, twenty years and a thousand light-years away from the sticky molasses heat of her childhood.

She dyes her hair the bright Christmas red of the scarves that the little old lady across the hall knits for everyone. She gets a job on a farm just out of town, taking care of the animals. It's hard work, the sort that leaves her muscles burning and her eyes bright. York and delta wear layered hoodies and chunky knitted sweaters, scarves and floppy hats and cheap sneakers even through the icy slush of the city sidewalks, hands kept warm with fingerless gloves and endless paper cups of coffee. Carolina's boots are sturdy and caked with mud and her jacket is thick and crinkles like paper in the cold, and sometimes from the passenger side of the farmer's truck she sees York leaned up against the brick outside a coffee shop handing out fliers for a poetry reading and he'll wave at her through the evening gloom, snowflakes sticking his lashes together and a big enthusiastic smile, the one that is reserved only for her.

Late at night they curl together under as many blankets as they can pile on the bed, noses and ears freezing in the icy air that is the price they pay instead of high rent. She tucks a leg over his, an arm over his shoulders and a hand over the scar at the back of his neck. Everything smells like coffee and hay and dirty snow melting off of coats and shoes. If they're very lucky, they sleep.


End file.
